Profile for Jonny Freedom - Vector Help, pretty please?

Jonny Freedom aka Jon is a 23.51 year old boy, has been a member since October 3, 2005, has scored 1319 submissions, giving an average score of 3.80.

Sep 11 '09 by Jonny Freedom

17 Comments

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Vector Help, pretty please?

Ok, i need some help with vectoring things...

I do a lot of 'digital illustration' in Photoshop. I like using the sensitivity of the brush tool and my tablet to get quite a wiggly, hand drawn effect. Example : My mate aaron

some people have asked me to do a piece for them to put on a canvas (were talking A2 size)...

THE DILEMA...
My sketches are not that big...
when i try and vectorize them so i can make them bigger, they always come out to clean looking, does anyone have any tips on vectoring something so that it still looks like its hand drawn?

maybe i need to move to illustrator but i dont know if it will provide the same effect?!

Much help is needed, you good, kind, knowledgeable threadless peeps!

Thanks :)

C Kid on Sep 11 '09 at 10:54am

You could try vector magic online.

Jonny Freedom on Sep 11 '09 at 11:02am

thanks C Kid... Just tried that and its better than anything i achieved. STILL not quite as much detail as i would like though.

Am i just being too fussy?

EricaTheRed on Sep 11 '09 at 11:02am

you could try playing around with brushes so the stroke doesn't look so uniform.

fc gravy on Sep 11 '09 at 11:05am

did u try live trace in AI?

bennyd302 on Sep 11 '09 at 11:06am

you could easily get that same effect in your portrait with a wacom in illustrator. I dont recommend live tracing your original tho.

Jonny Freedom on Sep 11 '09 at 11:06am

fc gravy : yeah i did but same thing... it comes out looking toooo vectored. know what i mean?

Jonny Freedom on Sep 11 '09 at 11:07am

my knowledge of illustrator is pretty lame, in fact it scares me a little.

fc gravy on Sep 11 '09 at 11:17am

ohhh, i see. do you draw straight from your tablet to PS?

Jonny Freedom on Sep 11 '09 at 11:19am

yeah :)

squatterjohn on Sep 11 '09 at 11:20am

Can you vectorise it with live trace, then blow it up, then go over some of the stuff again in Photoshop to make it return to being more sketchy?

Jonny Freedom on Sep 11 '09 at 11:29am

guess i could do that....

Jonny Freedom on Sep 11 '09 at 5:48pm

except i feel like its more of a temporary fix, rather than a solution...

NiNTH WHEEL on Sep 11 '09 at 5:56pm

If you mess around with the live trace settings, you can pretty well keep (almost) all of the detail. I have a custom setting labeled 'enlargement' that I use for this purpose and retains the varied scratchy quality to the linework. The only drawback is that it does take a good bit of time for it to do the trace (though my computer isn't the newest).

In short, mess with your live trace settings and once you find a setup that works, save it.

NiNTH WHEEL on Sep 11 '09 at 6:00pm

From and ink drawing with some photoshop halftone manipulation, but the lines in this were vectorized from a .psd file.

Jonny Freedom on Sep 11 '09 at 6:15pm

oh sweet! Thanks NiNTH WHEEL, ive always felt guilty for attempting the live trace... nice to know other people do it too...

4 days later

mudra on Sep 16 '09 at 5:45am

when you do live trace (use tracing options.. not the presets), just set "path fitting" to 0px instead of it's default which is 2px, and that should preserve your line quality.
i'm not a huge fan of live trace but sometimes it's necessary.
you'd probably be better off just using illustrator to create your drawings instead of photoshop.

5 days later

Bohemiantoe on Sep 22 '09 at 12:13am

I know I'm on here late - but for future reference, if you create some of your own brushes - you can make your lines look as raggedy ann raunchy or smooth as you want. It's relatively easy to make them as well.
Here's a link on how to do it.

http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/creating_simple_art_brushes_in_illustrator/

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